Career
In 1940 he entered the Opus Dei organization.
In 1946 he was ordained a Catholic priest, and became a professor of philosophy at the University of Madrid.
He made his first trip to India in 1954 where he studied Indian philosophy and religion at the University of Mysore and Banaras Hindu University, where he met several Western monks seeking Eastern forms for the expression of their Christian beliefs. "I left Europe as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian," he later wrote.
While in Jerusalem during 1962, he was summoned to Rome by Opus Dei founder and director, Saint JosemarĂa Escrivá, who expelled him after a brief trial where he was charged with disobedience to the organization.
In 1966 he became a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School and a professor of religious studies at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972. For many years he taught in the spring and spent the rest of the year doing research in India. Where the typical approach to Cross-Cultural Religious Studies, especially in a secular university, was to hold two or more traditions at arm's length and draw lines of comparison between them, Panikkar's approach was to view issues in the real world through the eyes of two or more traditions.
In 1987 he moved to Tavertet in Catalonia, in the hills north of Barcelona, where he founded the Raimon Panikkar Vivarium Foundation, a center for intercultural studies.
Panikkar authored more than 40 books and 900 articles. His complete works are being published in Italian. His 1989 Gifford Lectures were published in English by Orbis in 2009 under the title "The Rhythm of Being."
In a statement from his residence in Tavertet dated January 26, 2010 he wrote: "Dear Friends . . . I would like to communicate with you that I believe the moment has come, (put off time and again), to withdraw from all public activity, both the direct and the intellectual participation, to which I have dedicated all my life as a way of sharing my reflections. I will continue to be close to you in a deeper way, through silence and prayer, and in the same way I would ask you to be close to me in this last period of my existence. You have often heard me say that a person is a knot in a network of relationships; in taking my leave from you I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for having enriched me with the relationship I have had with each of you. I am also grateful to all of those who, either in person or through association, continue working to spread my message and the sharing of my ideals, even without me. Thankful for the gift of life which is only such if lived in communion with others: it is with this spirit that I have lived out my ministry."
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